In the past, Hypothetical Audience, I’ve mentioned how I’m somewhat a fan of the current crop of Marvel Comics-based films, albeit with some heavy caveats. As is a natural progression, they’ve also done a couple of shorter-format series (I’m not going to call them TV for reasons that will swiftly become apparent), helmed by Agents of SHIELD. I will freely admit that that particular series didn’t gel well with me, something about how the characterisations were handled and the story was paced really gelled badly. Now recently, I have been getting into this whole Netflix streaming thing, mostly for old Graham Linehan sitcoms and the American remake of House of Cards, so when news of Marvel’s recent deal with them came through I was initially apprehensive. However, when the first fruit of this collaboration, Daredevil, hit the… series of tubes (what’s an appropriate equivalent of Airwaves for the internet), I was quite surprised by the amount of good press it got compared to it’s forebears. I decided to give it a go, and y’know what? It didn’t totally suck!
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Tag / marvel universe
On Shared Universes and Marvels
Hello Hypothetical Audience, did you have a good Christmas-solstice-whatever and New Years? Brilliant! But now we must face facts, accept that 2015 has now occurred and get on with things once again. So, for the first column of the year I thought I’d share some thoughts I had while watching films over the break. Over the last few weeks I’ve been watching an awful lot of films that have come out of the Marvel film studio, and for the most part they’ve been very good (the only dud I’ve seen so far being Iron Man 2, which was merely a passable filler), and they’ve been attempting to do what the comics have been doing since time immemorial by tying all the characters and events in to a single shared universe. This is a departure from how this has been run previously, mostly due to the fact that all the licences are now being held under a single studio rather than the mess that previously existed, allowing for multi film-, and even franchise-, arcs to exist. This is certainly the first time something like this has been tried with such a large scope, however it may not be as good a thing as it sounds, depending on how it’s handled, and I shall tell you for why after the read-more-thing.
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